How to sharpen a card scraper - easily!

Let's talk about how to sharpen one of these card scrapers. You're gonna wanna have some sort of file something to keep that file square if possible. And I'm gonna show you an alternative to this as well. Obviously you're gonna need a card scraper and you need some sort of way to attach things to the bench, whether that's a moxon vise or some sort of clamp or t-track in the side of your bench. Whatever it is, you just need a way to be able to hold this up. If you don't have any of those things, there's a video on how to make a moxon vise. I'll link it up here in the corner. As well, you can just use some of those wooden clamps, clamp those to your bench and then you'll be able to do this too. And finally for me, I'm gonna be using a 600 grit diamond plate, but you can absolutely use whatever your preferred sharpening system may be.

If you have waterstones, you can use those. If you wanna use sandpaper or lapping film, you can even use that. What I like about the diamond stone is I don't have to be careful about gouging it. So first I'm gonna show you what I'm doing with this inexpensive little 90 degree jig that Lee Valley sells, and I'll make sure that I link that down below. Basically what I wanna do is I'm creating a square edge, so I'm just gonna rest this right against the edge of my scraper. And I'm just gonna take a few strokes of this.

So you're looking for things to start looking shiny. If it's looking dull or scratched up or anything, you just want a nice, clean, shiny surface. Now let me show you how to do this. If you don't wanna spend the money on one of these. Grab a piece of wood that is flat along one face and no wider than the distance between the top of your card scraper and whatever's gonna be holding it. We wanna create a groove in this piece of wood that the file is going to be able to sit into nice and secure. So the best way to do this, I found, is to slowly sneak up on the cut, take one pass, move over the fence a little bit, test the fit, and just keep on doing this until you find that the file is able to go ahead and slip right in and stays in position at a 90 degree angle to the face. Take this jig that you've just created and use it just like I showed you with the Veritas right angle jig.

Your next step is going to be cleaning up all of those file marks off of that edge. I like to take my card scraper at a little bit of an angle across the diamond plate or whatever I'm sharpening it with. And again, we're just looking for everything to start to look shiny and clean and for those file marks to disappear. So you're just gonna keep on working on it at this diagonal angle until you get to the place that you want it to be at and then wipe it off. Now if you need a little bit of help keeping it flat, you can also grab just a block of wood and use it as a guide running the wood against the stone and against the card scraper. And that should be fine. Once you've got one edge, you're just gonna flip it around and you're gonna do the other edge.

And you could go with this just flat on here. I like to employ the ruler trick. It just gets the, the edge off just that little bit. Take a block like this, put that pressure down, try to keep as even as pressure of pressure as possible. You just need that very edge there. Do that for all four sides. To create a burr, I'm going to use the flat side of an old chisel. Really any kind of hardened tool steel will do. You could even use a carbide router bit using the shank, but we're gonna keep this completely perpendicular to the edge right now. And I'm gonna do about five, maybe 10 strokes back and forth across the edge of the scraper. Once I have done that, I will slightly angle to one side, probably just about a five degree angle, and then keeping that angle, locking my wrists,

again, I'm gonna do five, maybe 10 passes across that edge. And once I've done that, I'll angle it five degrees the other direction and turn the burr on that side as well. Now, my favorite way is actually to use a jig. So what I do is, is I take a little bit of light machine oil or you can even use a little bit of the oil that tends to be behind your ear and wipe that on the edge. And then this here is a veritas honing guide or card scraper guide. I've got it set to zero degrees for my first pass, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And I'll go from the other direction. After I've done that, I really like to set a five degree angle and then do it all over again. Set that then again, one, two... There's a burr there now too. As you can see, this first side here is making some really nice curls. Now I'll also flip it around to the side that we used our other method for and whether you used the chisel or the honing guide, you're gonna get a great burr if you follow these steps. And so everyone, I hope that you've enjoyed, that you'll like and subscribe. And until next time, remember, make sawdust, not excuses.